Perennial island visitor – seaweed – keeps city on its toes

In the summer, Galveston's beaches are dotted with rental umbrellas and skirted by seaweed. (Toni Salama/Chicago Tribune/MCT)

As Galveston’s 2012 summer season kicks into full swing, city officials are grappling with a perennial Island visitor – seaweed.

Sure, it’s smelly and often takes up space better suited for beach towels and lawn chairs, but seaweed – also known as sargassum – is a vital component of the beach’s health, said Kelly de Schaun, executive director of the Galveston Park Board of Trustees.

“The maintenance of the beaches is a balancing act,” she said. “On the one hand we want to accommodate our visitors to the island who are not accustomed to a coastal environment. On the other hand it’s important to preserve the natural habitat of the beaches.”

This year, the park board is stepping up efforts to educate visitors about the environmental benefits of the seaweed and has published a new brochure on the park board’s website, and soon to be available and at island hotels and rental properties. Galveston Island Beach Patrol tourism ambassadors also will pass out informational trinkets — such as wrist bands and stickers — at the island’s beaches throughout peak tourism season.

While most of the city sleeps, work crews converge on the 32-mile Galveston coastline with front-end loaders to gently collect and deposit mounds of seaweed along dunes near the seawall.

The crews keep an eye open for Kemp’s Ridley Sea Turtle eggs among the sargassum, since summer marks the beginning of the endangered turtle’s breeding season, de Shaun said.

“All of our teams have a designated turtle observer to look for the turtles and their nesting sites,” she said. “When they are found, we have to move around it and call NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), which does a turtle watch for the upper Texas coast.

“They’ll rescue the turtle eggs to the hatchery,” she said.

Last season, Galveston’s seaweed problem was the worst the island had seen in a decade, according to de Shaun.

“At this point it is less than last season,” she said. “It’s hard to predict. It’s the same as trying to predict the weather.”

The seaweed, which typically begins to show up from March-August, sometimes generates complaints from visitors.

“The island has five million visitors each year,” de Shaun said. “There are not many complaints when you think of it that way (number of tourists). It’s mostly people wanting to know what we do with it.”